Your Pitch (Not Product) Is The Problem

Hayes Drumwright
, ContributorI am the author of the column, “Chronicles of an Entrepreneur."Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

I had one of those terrible epiphanies as an entrepreneur last week. I realized I might have wasted eight months thinking about product fit instead of pitch fit… To be fair, I had never really given pitch fit a ton of scientific thought. One meeting changed all that.

I was with my head of Business Development at a coffee shop in downtown San Francisco. We were excited because we were meeting with Joe Sexton. Joe is currently an Executive in Residence at Greylock and Lightspeed, and was the former President of Worldwide Field Operations at AppDynamics. AppD is a stellar startup in Silicon Valley that has created an insane amount of value for clients and investors. Joe was an integral part in that.

The Problem

Joe entered the coffee shop, put on his therapist hat, and we started telling him how things were going at our start-up POPin. The company had made tremendous headway in the past six months with logo acquisition. We would show that the product could do many, many things and we would find an economic buyer in a department. They would begin using it and then we would get stuck. We were not getting introduced to other departments as we needed to be. We explained that for POPin, intros to other departments were vitally important because the product connects leaders to the trenches in a way that creates buy-in. To be a success we must penetrate as much of leadership as possible in all departments. We lacked adoption.

Joe asked to see our pitch. About ten minutes later my head was spinning. I had that horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. I remember as we left the coffee shop that I grabbed my phone, went to the notes app and wrote the following note, “The doubt never goes away… There is so much you do not know.” I walked out feeling that if Joe was running POPin, we would be miles ahead of where I had been able to lead the company. His go-to-market skills were PhD level. His connections were incredible. All this, not to mention that he is annoyingly likable…

Pitch Fit Matters

Here is what happened. I showed Joe a presentation that explained what the product was. It is a crowdsourcing platform that works on mobile or web. We bragged about some logos we had and we then pulled it up on our phones to show him what it looked like and how it operated. He indulged us. After this, he seemed to understand what we were going after with the product and asked us “why” he would use it. I thought I had covered that in the beginning of the pitch, but he wanted to hear it again, apparently. I was not crisp. I was not crisp at all. I knew “why” there was a need for POPin, but I was not explaining it simply and if I as the CEO had trouble doing this, how could I scale a salesforce to do it? Joe explained that we were good at saying and showing what it was, but people bought the “why.”